This article contains several forecasts, including the possible start of a major war with unforeseeable consequences, if the U.S. should happen to attack Iran .

Of course it is in the nature of forecasts to be speculative. There are also forecasts that are intended to serve as warnings and thereby contribute to preventing the events under analysis from ever taking place.

The world’s financial elite, long having made their homes in the metropolises of Western Europe, also with a major branch in New York City , may be the party that is really behind what could be an attempt to start World War III by pitting the U.S. against the Asiatic land powers, most notably Russia

The elite have long viewed control of the vast resource-rich Asian continent as the key to control of the world, with the fulcrum of domination being the oil-rich Middle East . Such a war could begin if the U.S. and Britain follow through by attacking Iran on the heels of the Afghan and Iraq wars and recent military deployments to the Persian Gulf region.

The attack may be nuclear, egged on by neocon extremists in the U.S. and their counterparts in Israel , who may simultaneously carry the attack to Lebanon and Syria . (See Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, “Beating the Drums of a Broader Middle East War,” Global Research, May 7, 2008.) These events are closely tied to the U.S. economic recession now underway and the 2008 presidential election.

What is unique about this analysis is the author’s contention that the U.S. is being used unwittingly by the European-based financial powers for their own purposes. They know that the U.S. economy is bankrupt, because they have made it so through a quarter century of financial manipulations that have destroyed our manufacturing base and left us horrendously in debt.

Now they have suckered us into the last thing we need—a major Asian land war that threatens to bring Russia and perhaps China into the fray. But that’s all right, because once we have exhausted ourselves and courted nuclear retaliation, Europe, which is uniting under the European Union, will likely be left standing, as will Israel .

Note that Israel was created by and owes its primary allegiance to the European financiers, especially those in London , even though the U.S. has been its primary arms supplier and enabler since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. If the financiers, aided by Israel , can instigate a major war to get rid of Russia , along with the U.S. , as world powers, they will have accomplished their aim.

The Unique Status of the U.S. and Russia

The U.S. and Russia are the two great continental powers which up until about a century ago most stood in the way of the rapacity and greed of the international financial elite. The people of both nations have a history of being deeply spiritual, talented and innovative, and rooted in the land. Both nations tried for a long time to keep Western Europe , with its history of economic and colonialist imperialism, at arms length.

Despite the wars and traumas of the 20th century, both the U.S. and Russia remain cultures where ordinary people have struggled to express themselves, to learn, to work, and to excel, even with Russia ’s background of Tsarist and Soviet autocracy. See, for instance, the writings of Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-).

This heritage is much different from that of the Western European aristocratic culture with its rigid class divisions, where an economically powerful oligarchy has controlled society for centuries and has always managed to stay on top despite wars and revolutions.

The aristocratic tradition is most notable in Great Britain , with the incredible wealth of the Windsor royal family and the concentric circles of power and influence which surround it. These circles are made up of a blend of the old nobility with the more recent additions of bankers, financiers, industrialists, government executives, media moguls, and intelligence operatives who continue to control much of the wealth of the world.

The people who settled America fled that predatory aristocratic culture to find freedom. It is less well known how Tsarist Russia resisted Western European domination, but it is a fact that a longstanding alliance among the House of Romanoff, the Orthodox Church, the rural nobility, and the peasantry came together to create a culture that successfully kept that nation free from external control for most of its history.

European Lust for Control of the Middle East

It was really the European elite, both deeply materialistic and coldly inhumane, that was responsible for both of the 20th century’s world wars, for funding the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia , and for bringing about today’s economic crisis that threatens to reduce to abject poverty or even starve perhaps half of the world’s population. Now a third world war threatens, and while it appears on the surface that the immediate cause may be U.S. ambitions in the Middle East , this is a mask for the underlying machinations of the European controllers who are pulling the strings.

These people couldn’t care less if the U.S. is bankrupted or destroyed in a larger Asian conflict while engaged in doing their dirty work. In fact that appears to be the plan. A nation like the U.S. that owes as much money as it does today to foreigners, including China and Japan who purchase close to half our national debt, is no longer master of its own destiny.

The European desire for military conquest of the Middle East dates to the Crusades which started in the 11th century. By the end of the 18th century, Great Britain had planted itself on the eastern terminus of the region through the conquest of India . In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt . World War I saw the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, with Britain and France redrawing the map of an area consisting of almost a million square miles. When Israel was founded in 1948, it became a Western bridgehead.

But today it’s the U.S. , with its bases in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, and conquests in Afghanistan and Iraq , that leads the charge. This is so, even though a glance at the map shows how contrary to our strategic interests—and how unimaginably expensive—it is for us to have been drawn into a major open-ended military commitment in this part of the world. Some call it empire. Rational men call it lunacy.

How has this come about? Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been dangerously dependent on Middle Eastern oil and on the OPEC nations to purchase our Treasury bonds. The need to sell our debt abroad came about late in the Vietnam War when our post-World War II trade surplus was reversed and the government went deeply into debt to pay for the war and the growth in income support entitlements.

But there is another explanation for why we are there—pressure from the Jewish lobby. This lobby acts in the U.S. , perhaps unwittingly and certainly against its own interests as U.S. citizens, as a surrogate not only for Israel , but, taking a longer view, also for the European financial elite who backed the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine in the first place.

Of course many Jews, including sizeable numbers in Israel , themselves no longer believe in policies which have brought them so much ill repute. Increasingly, people of goodwill, including many of the Jewish faith, are coming to understand that neither opposition to the abuses of the financial elite nor questioning the actions of the Israeli state itself is anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic.

But if events continue in the same direction, the Asiatic land powers, now loosely organized through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China , Russia , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan , and Uzbekistan , with Iran as an observer, will have had enough. There is a line in the sand facing west as well as east. A major war is clearly on its way which seems to be timed to coincide with the ongoing economic collapse that is undermining the U.S. economy and also threatening to plunge much of the world into famine.

Connection with the 2008 Presidential Election

The war scenario is unfolding now and will likely accelerate as we approach the November presidential election. The actions underway appear to be designed to present any new president with a fait accompli, where corrective action is no longer possible. It would be the last and worst of the catastrophes visited on our nation by the revolutionary cabal of George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and the neocon shock troopers who took over when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency after the 2000 Florida election debacle. Within nine months came the 9/11 attacks, followed by wars against Afghanistan and Iraq using off-the-shelf plans. Next came the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Acts.

Now in 2008 the three remaining presidential candidates are all compromised. Hillary Clinton, with her husband Bill, have long been servitors of that branch of the international financial elite headquartered on Wall Street in New York City . Recently, Republican candidate John McCain traveled to do homage to Israel , then attended a soiree with the Fourth Baron Rothschild in London . Barack Obama has also affirmed his loyalty to Israel , though his utterances against Iran are less vehement than those of Hillary Clinton, who has threatened to “obliterate” that nation.

Obama appears the most likely to become president, because the financial controllers, acting through the corporate media, seem to have designated him as such. Hillary Clinton is under intense pressure to get out, even though the Democratic race is a virtual dead heat and she just routed Obama in the West Virginia primary. The latest blow to Clinton is the endorsement of Obama by John Edwards, the Democrats’ 2004 vice presidential candidate.

Obama is the candidate who came out of nowhere because eighty percent of Americans believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. He is the candidate calling for “change,” whatever that means.

Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times, says, “Mrs. Clinton, we’re assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats babies. But her policy proposals continue to be surprisingly bold and progressive….Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox.”

The determination by the financial controllers that Obama is the anointed one may also be shown by the entry into the race of former Georgia congressman Bob Barr as the candidate of the Libertarian Party. Barr will siphon votes away from John McCain and make Obama’s election a certainty, just as Ross Perot did with President George H.W. Bush in 1990, allowing the election to swing to pro-business Democrat Bill Clinton.

Barr’s entry is no accident and serves multiple purposes. According to journalist James P. Tucker, Jr., for instance, attendees at an April 25-28 meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington , D.C. , made a determination to stop Republican candidate Dr. Ron Paul’s momentum in stirring up a political “revolution.” (James P. Tucker, Jr., “Trilateral Commission: Global Elite Gather in D.C.,” Global Research, May 6, 2008)

Dr. Paul, who has been delivering the news that the Federal Reserve by which the bankers rule should be abolished, and that U.S. foreign policy based on military conquest of the world should end, has been causing, according to the Trilateralists cited by Tucker, “significant future damage.” Bob Barr will doubtless be awarded handsomely for his trouble in helping de-fuse Dr. Paul’s movement.

Dr. Paul is to be commended for his stance in taking on the establishment, and from the financiers’ point of view, such populist uprisings as he is leading obviously must be checked. Using a Libertarian candidate to do this costs them nothing, as it is almost comical how the “macho” but outdated laissez-faire economics of the Libertarians play into the hands of the privately-owned banking system which makes all the important economic decisions anyway.

Obviously the financial establishment must feel reassured by the likelihood that Obama really won’t change much of anything. Overseas, this could make it even more certain that a wider war will start before the election, so that Obama, being “cautious and relatively orthodox,” as Krugman says, will go along with whatever scenario he is handed and so will be handcuffed by events.

The trigger could be a 9/11-type faux attack, possibly a “suitcase” nuke going off in a U.S. port city, as has been rumored. Other possible scenarios include an attack on Iran being a cover for the election to be “stolen” from Obama, or even for the election to be canceled, with Bush continuing as president. Perhaps this is what explains Bush’s curious detachment in the face of his coming departure as the most unpopular president in history. He may even entertain the psychopathic idea that cancelling the election could be perfectly “legal” and within his rights as a wartime chief executive. What would Obama do if faced with such an outrage while out on the campaign trail? Perhaps nothing.

Meanwhile, Democratic figures in Congress, such as Senator Joe Biden and Congressman John Conyers, are threatening to impeach President Bush if he attacks Iran without a congressional resolution. Unfortunately, the Democrats are totally lacking in credibility given their failure to force Bush to retreat from Iraq despite their mandate in the 2006 elections where they regained a majority in both houses. Bush would probably like nothing more in the waning days of his presidency than calling their bluff.

A Calamity Rooted in History

Events on this scale take decades or even centuries to develop. In fact such plans may have been in the works at least since the late 1800s, when three world wars were allegedly forecast by such figures as the celebrated Confederate general and Freemason Albert Pike, elected Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction in 1859.

True to Pike’s prediction, 1914-18 saw World War I, which forced the centuries-old rule of the European landed nobility to accommodate to the banking elites and to the heads of the industrial cartels which built the war machines of the combating nations.

According to Benjamin Freedman (1890-1984), an American eye-witness to events within the Woodrow Wilson administration, Wilson took the U.S. to war only after being pressured to support Great Britain when the British agreed to facilitate creation of a Zionist state in Palestine . The original Zionists, led by Theodor Herzl, had been favorably disposed to accepting a British offer of virgin land in Kenya , but the financiers wanted Palestine because of Middle Eastern oil and proximity to the Suez Canal . The result was the Balfour Declaration of 1916.

At the end of World War I came the Russian Revolution, when the financiers paid for the Bolsheviks to destroy the Russian Christian monarchy of the Romanoffs. Soviet communism was the result. Less than a generation later another world war was fought, with World War II ending with the triumph of the U.S. , Britain , France , the Soviet Union, and China as allies. Afterwards, finance capitalism exerted its control of the developing world through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. According to economist Michael Hudson, the West declared the existence of a Cold War only after the Soviet Union refused to accede to U.S. hegemony by joining the IMF. (Michael Hudson, Superimperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, 2003)

Another major revolution followed World War II, as had happened after World War I, but this time in China , where the communists under Mao Tse-Tung took over. In 1948, the nation of Israel was declared, partly through the instrumentality and wealth of the Third Baron Rothschild, who was also an MI5 controller and alleged Soviet agent. (See Roland Perry, The Fifth Man, 1994.)

The key event in how the financial elite gained control over the U.S. in the postwar world was the 1971 decision by the Nixon administration to remove the dollar gold peg and allow world currencies to “float.” After the U.S. agreed to the explosion of OPEC oil prices in the 1970s, dollars flooded the world. (See Richard C. Cook, “Extraordinary Times, Intentional Collapse, and Takedown of the U.S.A. ,” Global Research, April 30, 2008.)

In 1979 the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker plunged the U.S. into recession to fight the resulting inflation, and the U.S. producing economy was wrecked. Since that time there has been no real growth of the U.S. GDP or the standard of living of American workers. Rather a steady and seemingly irreversible decline has set in under the euphemistic title of the “service economy.” Since the early 1980s there has been a constant cycle of inflating and deflating asset bubbles, with the latest episode being the collapse of the housing bubble following the ruinous housing and real estate inflation engineered by Alan Greenspan, Volcker’s successor as head of the Federal Reserve.

The result of the bubble economy under the Federal Reserve regime known as “monetarism” has been a debt overhang on the U.S. producing economy of $50 trillion, four times the nominal GDP of $13 billion. There is an additional overhang of more than $500 trillion in derivative speculation worldwide that many legitimate U.S. investors, including employee pension funds, have been caught up in.

Severe economic distress usually leads to war, with the elite financing both sides and using the resulting chaos to redraw the map to their advantage. We have now had two world wars, and the third appears to be coming. The end result, according to “conspiracy theorists,” is supposed to be a financial world dictatorship with Europe ’s financial and hereditary aristocrats at the top of the heap. The center of this dictatorship would be Northern Europe, with the focal point being the two-square-mile financial district known as the City of London . This group also controls the European Union headquartered in Brussels .

Then what is left of North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be tightly controlled colonies inhabited by relatively small numbers of “human cattle” and their overseers. The advanced technological execution for the machinery of control and oppression would be the job of professionals in the field, probably including the British MI5, the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, and private armed mercenaries like Blackwater and Halliburton.

Dangers of the Present Moment

Whatever may be the murky background of the financiers’ conspiracy of subversion, what makes the present situation so dangerous is that entire nations and regions are slipping from their grasp. Russia , China , Venezuela , Bolivia , Ecuador , and other nations are becoming increasingly independent. Meanwhile, as food prices inflate, people in developing nations are facing starvation, even as Western agribusiness and oil companies reap record profits. Political upheavals are inevitable.

It has never been so obvious to so many that Western-style finance capitalism is ruining the world. An example of the growing awareness is a new book entitled Currency Wars (Huobi Zhanzheng), written by a Chinese author who lived in the United States and worked on Wall Street.

According to Asia Times Online (April 8, 2008), Currency Wars “has become a runaway bestseller in China in the past nine months. The book caused a sensation of interests and heated discussions in Chinese cyber space and other media on Western intentions behind its demand that China quickly appreciate the value of its currency. Song Hongbing, the book’s author, draws from a wide range of literature in English and argues that the modern history of international finance is primarily a process of how a very small number of powerful families in the West have established their control over governments and international institutions.

“According to Song, there is no such thing as a free market when it comes to global finance and financial institutions. From the Rothschild family at the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the rise of J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and other prominent U.S. financial powerhouses, Song sees all the modern wars, depressions, and manmade disasters having a linkage to the manipulation of a handful of Western private bankers.”

And it’s not only in China . Through the internet, hundreds of millions of people are wising up to what the central banks and global corporations run by the world’s super-rich are doing to them.

So the financiers are realizing that things are not going their way. The world is becoming more diverse. Nations, peoples, and regions long for freedom and security. Science and technology have the potential to bring about astounding improvements in the standard of living, as well as individual knowledge and potency.

There is also a worldwide resurgence of nationalism, for example, in Russia . After that nation overthrew communism in 1991, the international financiers attempted to move in through the Russian oligarchs and take control of the nation’s resources. But a free election brought Vladimir Putin to power. He succeeded in producing on Russian soil a nationalist revolution which is loathed by the Western financier press, such as the Washington Post. Russia today is regaining its identity and independence.

In East Asia , China is threatening to break out of the system of U.S. dollar hegemony and use its own currency to bring about commercial stability in the region. In the Middle East, Iran has yet to cave in to U.S. pressure, the Palestinians still defy Israel , and in other areas around the world, including Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, movements toward indigenous self-governance threaten to upset the “ Washington consensus” and introduce a truly multilateral tenor to world affairs. The euro is also making inroads as an alternative reserve currency.

Meanwhile, the American colossus is eroding. The U.S. government, with almost $10 trillion in debt, has been declared functionally bankrupt by experts. The domestic economy no longer has a manufacturing sector worth speaking of. Outside of the financial centers on the east and west coasts, the nation’s business establishment is deeply in debt and noncompetitive with overseas producers. Public health is declining.

The U.S. financial system began to deflate in the summer of 2007 but has so far avoided a wholesale crash due to the easy credit policies of the Federal Reserve in allowing financial institutions to roll over their debts. This is all likely to terminate after the 2008 election, when the Federal Reserve stops bailing out the system and real depression sets in. Simply put, the U.S. population no longer has anything close to sufficient income to support its accustomed way of life, especially with the ongoing collapse of the standard of living due to oil and food price increases.

So the war-mongers may be thinking they must now act before it’s too late—before a worldwide convulsion throws them from their seats of power. The time for the financiers to set off the next major conflagration may have arrived. Naïve American politicians are there, as always, ready to help, perhaps sensing but not really acknowledging that they have been led into a trap.

The Real U.S. Strategic Interest

If the next big war starts soon it will likely have been triggered in order to distract attention from our economic woes. Once chaos sets in there will be food riots and starvation around the world, including in America . And yes, the police and military are getting ready. The war will be a handy excuse to lock up people by using the Patriot Acts and various executive orders signed by President George W. Bush. Canada and Israel have already signed a joint public safety “partnership,” which doubtless includes cooperation with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

At this point you would expect American policy-makers to realize that the U.S. has no strategic interest in maintaining its military forces overseas in such a vulnerable posture and would start withdrawing. You would also expect that they would do what President Franklin Roosevelt did during the New Deal which was to utilize public credit to rebuild the U.S. public and private infrastructure before the economy collapses altogether.

The fact that none of the mainstream political leaders, least of all McCain or the Democratic front-runner Obama, has any intention of taking such decisive action proves that policy is not being controlled from within the United States . When a person or a nation fails to act in its own self-interest, there has to be a reason. That reason is usually that its actions are controlled from outside.

The fact is that the U.S. economy is controlled by international finance, not by the U.S. business establishment or by our own political system. So the U.S. cannot change anything, especially in taking effective and rational measures to get the nation out of debt. Similarly in the area of foreign and military affairs, the nation appears unable to backtrack from its march to catastrophe.

So whether the people of this nation want it or not—and a majority do not—wars are being waged, with the one against Iran likely to be followed by a general world conflict—the battle for Asia . It will be the financiers and their personal military forces—chiefly Israel , which is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons—who will be left to pick up the pieces once the U.S. and Russia have reduced each other’s forces to rubble.

Can anything be done? Of course. A U.S. president worthy of the office would take two immediate actions. The first would be to abolish the Federal Reserve, as Ron Paul advocates. But instead of hankering for a Libertarian “free-banking” system more suited to 1830 than to 2008, “We the People” should demand that our elected representatives in the White House and Congress use public credit to rebuild our economy and provide our people with real income security. (See Richard C. Cook, “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States,” Global Research, April 26, 2007.)

The second immediate action should be to stop trying to conquer the globe militarily on behalf of alien financial and geopolitical interests. These measures will also allow the governmental tax burden to be cut radically, because the main purposes of the income tax are to pay interest on the national debt and finance wars.

It is now time for all genuine American patriots, including those in the military, intelligence, and political establishments, as well as students, workers, employees, managers, industrialists, and retirees to recognize the crisis and step forward fearlessly to defend the real interests of our country. Increasingly people are coming to understand that winning the battle for America requires steadfast opposition to the cabal which holds power and is ready to throw our nation and its population to the wolves for a bit of vainglory and thirty pieces of silver.

Unfortunately, it seems to be the way with empires for those in power to be identified exclusively with their personal self-interest while the world crashes down around them. People must wake up. The house is on fire. We can only hope that some still have eyes to see.

Of course everything in Washington could change with a responsible president who is supported by a new Congress which has the determination that should be expected after the voters take their vengeance this November on a Republican Party that Bush, Cheney, and Rice have tarred with infamy. But then again only if a widened Middle Eastern war can be prevented between now and then. It could be prevented if an awakened military loyal to the Constitution refused to obey the illegal orders of a repudiated lame duck president acting without congressional authorization.

For the longer-term, we should step back, reassess the geopolitical outlook, and take the long-overdue step of recognizing who our natural allies in the world really are. One of these is Russia . Instead of fighting Russia we should forge a new alliance with that nation with the aim of securing peace, first in the Middle East and then in the world.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His Challenger website is at www.richardccook.com. A new economics website at www.RealSustainableLiving.com is upcoming, with partner/author Susan Boskey. To get on his mailing list, for questions and comments, or to pre-purchase copies of his new book, write [email protected].

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.